#ennobling

Music is not only an ennobling and educational factor. Music is the healer of health.

Evolving Your Sense of Self-Worth to Increase Your Wealth-Worth: 4 keys to flourishing in 2017

The truth [that Heavenly Mother exists] will finally be accepted by the children of men. It is a truth from which, when fully realized, the perfect ‘emancipation’ and ennobling of women will result.

MS. POPOVA: I was listening to an interview with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and he said that people contribute to Wikipedia for free because they want to do something useful with their time. And yes, I agree. I think people hunger to do something useful with their time in our age of kind of uselessness, time uselessly spent. But also something ennobling with their time — this can't quite be quantified. There's no utilitarian value to it the way that there is with usefulness. But I deeply believe that people want to be good, that more than that, we want to be better, to grow, to ennoble our souls. And I have hope for this medium with that lens. ... MS. TIPPETT: [laughs] Alright. You are who you are. How — if I ask you how you measure success, like, in any given day, what comes to mind? MS. POPOVA: Well, once again, I am going to side with Thoreau. And he said something like, if the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers, it's more elastic and more starry and more immortal, that is your success. And for me, that's pretty much it — waking up and being excited and curiously restless to face the day ahead, and being very present with that day, and then going to bed feeling like it actually happened, that the day was lived. I mean, there's nothing more than that, really. ... MS. TIPPETT: You wrote somewhere, “We are a collage of our interests, our influences, our inspirations, all the fragmentary impressions we've collected by being alive and awake to the world. Who we are is simply a finely-curated catalogue of those.” Which brings the word “curation” — which I understand you're not as fond of anymore — into this — into the answer of what it means to be human, that we curate our lives. How do you think your sense of what it means to be human, that grand question, has evolved? How would you start to talk about that? MS. POPOVA: Hmm. I think much of it has shifted from an understanding that's based on concreteness to an understanding that's based on relational things. That this notion of not just who we are but who we are in relation to our past selves, the people around us, the culture that we came from, the culture that we live in, all the different lives we've had. And for me, certainly, I feel like I've had all these different lives. I grew up in a country that is pretty much the exact opposite of my life right now. I grew up having nothing, and then I sort of clawed my way up and out. And now I live in New York City. And I am able to afford my own life and live my own life without worrying about things that I worried about for many, many, many, many years. And it's so strange how we're able to carry forward this mystery of personal identity even when our present selves are so different from our future selves. And I — and from our past selves most of all. And I think a lot about this question of, what is a person? I mean, how — am I the same person as my childhood self? And sure, we share the same body, but even that body is so different. It’s unrecognizably different. Our lives are so different. Our ideas and ideals are so different. And to me, this question of what it means to be human is always a question of elasticity of being. It's never an arrival point, you know? But I want to also go back to this — you mentioned the fragments, this notion of the fragments. I mean, consider that — the things that we encourage when we talk about a full life, wholeheartedness and mindfulness. And of course, we are so much more expansive than our hearts and our minds and our perfect abs or whatever fragment we fixate on.  But yet, we compartmentalize our experience in that way. We divide it into these fragments to be divided and conquered. And I was reading this morning, actually, for a piece that I'm writing for tomorrow, Virginia Woolf's diary, which is not a journal, but a diary. And she says, “One can't write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.” And she talks about the slipperiness of the soul and the delicacy and complexity of the soul. But I think the fullest people, the people most whole and most alive, are always those unafraid and unashamed of the soul. And the soul is never an assemblage of fragments. And it always is.

Suffering isn't ennobling, recovery is.

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